With critical AI and ML-driven innovations in digital marketing, 2024 will be a landmark year for strategic disruptions.
While predictions abound for digital marketing in 2024, these emerging trends will pressure CMOs to invest in the right tools and skills.
Here is a pragmatic look at the points CMOs must focus on in 2024 to improve their marketing planning, investments, and strategies.
Cross-functional Leadership Skills
Developing cross-functional leadership skills will be key for CXOs in 2024.
Business research group the Conference Board’s CMO+CCO Meter survey reveals that 80% of them will develop more outward-looking ideas. They will foster collaborative approaches between the marketing and sales team.
Because focusing on customers is the new essence of marketing, CMOs must lead this cross-functional strategic planning process between their teams and other C-suites.
Let’s take an example with the product development team. How should CMOs collaborate with them to boost cross-functional skills?
Product development identifies the demand first based on sales pattern data taken from the marketing team.
As the development team builds products, CMOs make consolidated marketing and sales plans to reach out to the right customers.
Then, they decide on the course of the development process and bring it to the market.
By gaining real-time data on consumer demand, marketers get insights into what is selling, what the competition is offering, and what buyers seek. This will help them strategize for sales.
If the CMO and the Development leader work together, it will provide enormous advantages to both functions.
Likewise, CMOs should have a forward-looking approach to investing in tools and technologies required to improve marketing in 2024.
Agile Marketing Management
CMOs need to adopt agile marketing strategies to succeed in 2024.
With continuous advancements in digital marketing, they need to be more concerned about implementation strategies and their outcomes.
For agile marketing projects, CMOs should create frameworks for teams, involving:
- Using tools for marketing content, processes, and function innovations.
- Synchronizing data-based tasks, such as data segmentation of the right customers.
- Providing tools that create a flow of marketing processes, like timely ad production and delivery across social channels, campaigns set up, and email-sending processes.
Agile marketing boosts productivity, efficiency, and visibility into activities with the help of data and reports.
They will need cross-functional team collaboration between sales, customer service, IT, and finance to incorporate agile strategies in their marketing space.
As per Sixth Annual CMO s Agenda The Agile Advantage The Methodology survey, 93% of CMOs practicing Agile say that their speed to market campaigns and products has improved.
It also finds that:
- 63% of marketing leaders consider agility as a high priority.
- 87% of CMOs adopted agile and made teams more productive
- 76% of CMOs agree that agile approaches helped them to prioritize strategies
- 80% of CMOs said that adopting agile helped them deliver more relevant end products to the right customers
Similarly, Agile Marketing Starts With The CMO reports that 70% of CMOs use agile marketing processes to analyze and boost marketing plans in less time.
Having the skills to plan agile marketing methods will ensure that marketing strategies are responsive, action-driven, and revenue-driven.
Market Insight
A modern CMO will require accurate data sources, advanced analytical tools, and a virtual reporting system to understand the market position and trends.
The reports and insights gained will help them closely understand buyer needs, competitors’ techniques, and trending approaches to which customers are responding the most!
Customers today interact with brands through different channels. So CMOs should invest more in AI and ML tools to ensure their strategies are omnichannel.
The tools will help marketers leverage virtual platforms to deliver better marketing campaigns. Most importantly, the decision-making process will become easier for CMOs. It means it will be all data-based and according to emerging customers’ demands.
Determining customers’ specific needs and developing targeted solutions will help CMOs use fewer resources, becoming cost-effective.
CMOs must master in using tools to see market insights. They should strategically use that insight to make decisions and help the business thrive!
Brand Resilience
Brand resilience is important for businesses moving into another era of the digital market. For this, CMOs should be skilled in maintaining brand position—called brand resilience.
Because customers prefer connecting with brands that engage them with creative and innovative solutions.
CMOs focusing on upskilling for this will be beneficial in 2024.
Maintaining a brand’s position and image throughout a quarter will require it to quickly adapt to new circumstances, changes in the economy, and digital trends.
Because resilience means keeping businesses and customers balanced and successful.
So, what CMOs can do is keep their data safe under the latest data privacy regulations to gain customers’ trust, state transparency in marketing activities, and use technical tools like AI, virtual chatbots, and others ethically.
Furthermore, keeping an analytical approach, which is based on data, is required for CMOs. It will help them make quick and informed decisions to maintain higher performance.
Adverity’s report Recession, Resilience, and Marketing Data states that 85% of CMOs agree that the ability to make data-driven decisions is important to gain a competitive advantage.
29% of CMOs plan to increase their data ops budget in 2024.
Most importantly, by adopting this practice, CMOs will chunk away the challenges of data silos that they faced before.
Instead, they can integrate the growing volume of data into a single source of truth to succeed and thrive in brand positioning competition ahead.
Conclusion
CMOs today will have to equally focus on internal departmental changes that come with business needs.
More collaboration and cross-functional operations will be among the entire C-Suite to make digital marketing successful.
This approach will also benefit the effective implementation of company resources and be more cost-effective with time.
It is critical to get ahead of the company’s digital transformation because its demand will only grow!
